Blue Stars (7 page)

When they broke for lunch, Ellen’s answering machine was blinking: several hang-ups and a wrong number. It had to have been a wrong number, because the male caller said only, “County police,” waited a long moment—clicking and voice noise in the background—and then hung up. Ellen didn’t worry. The department phones were always doing weird things. Forty minutes later when the secretary opened the conference room without knocking, a policeman standing behind her, Ellen still didn’t understand that it might have anything to do with her. Or Don.

He had collapsed on Langdon Street, a block away from the state building where he worked. His assistant later told Ellen he had stepped out to buy a cup of coffee. Bystanders gathered; an ambulance arrived. He was taken to Meriter, but by the time Ellen arrived via a swift police escort, soundless lights flashing, he was already dead. Gone at age thirty-five from a cerebral aneurysm.

Because it was an asymptomatic onset, with no discernible cause, Ellen was left—in those chaotic days and weeks afterward—with bizarre speculations, heart-pounding guesses. Were the meals she cooked too fatty, not fatty enough? Was it because of a childhood spent riding bikes without a helmet, climbing trees and occasionally falling out of them? Could it be related to Flo-Jo, the way he jumped up and screamed when she burst across the finish line? She didn’t want to obsess in this manner, she wanted to do as she could tell everyone wanted her to do: come to accept what couldn’t be understood, with grace and forbearance. So she let it go, the
why.
And plunged into the
what now.

Her mother moved in, for a while. Her classes were reassigned. Her children, too young to really understand, asked over and over where Daddy was, and she learned how to answer. The first
this,
the first
that
. She allowed herself certain moments of wild theatrical weeping, a couple all-nighters of regret and existential doubt, a journal she never wanted to read again. Little by little Ellen taught herself to get through it, this life after Don had died.

Over time Ellen’s own narrative of her life had incorporated Don’s early death as a formative event. An essential, isolated incident that determined a good deal of her personality and the way the family functioned; a background sadness that came to seem inevitable but had been overcome. So why now, at age fifty-five, in the Parris Island parade stands facing a Marine Corps marching band—dozens of blue pant legs with one red stripe, stepping in unison—did she begin to revise the assumptions she had made, about life and death and her experience with both?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the buoyant female voice on the loudspeakers. “Please rise as the nation’s flag passes directly in front of you.”

Ellen shaded her eyes and tried to differentiate among the hundreds of new Marines in their identical tan shirts and dark green hats. “Covers,” they were called. Last night at the Family Day ice cream social with Mike she had met some of his fellow recruit friends. “This is Ellen Silverman,” Mike said each time. “Great to meet you, Mrs. Silverman,” these strong, tanned boys said while shaking her hand. “Great to meet you, ma’am.” And then they would proudly introduce Mike to members of their family.

Now she couldn’t tell which one he was—and that was the point, wasn’t it? That they be interchangeable. Disgusted, she glanced around the audience. Surely she wasn’t the only one here who harbored doubts, who refused to be impressed by these shows of military pomp? But as with all things President Bush, there was no room here for uncertainty or dissent or debate or intellectual consideration. Just rigid formats, blind acquiescence, and knee-jerk obedience to the red-white-and-blue.

Ellen wished she had brought water; the parade grounds were muggy, with no shade anywhere. She wore a black-and-white-striped sleeveless silk top, and black linen pants. A folded jacket lay in her lap, getting wrinkled. Most people in the stands wore specially ordered Recruit Graduation T-shirts, coded in colors based on battalion and company.

The Marines marched around and around, grouping on one side of the depot and then the other. Ellen thought they looked like rows of uniformed Fascists from a grainy 1930s film; she enjoyed this bitter comparison in the privacy of her own mind. Finally they came to order just in front of the stands. Legs apart, hands behind backs. Now the announcer was a male voice: “Today we graduate three battalions from the United States’ most respected branch of the service. Let me tell you a little bit about what these men have gone through in the past twelve weeks, and why we are proud, today, to call them Marines.” Then a list of various training activities, weapons instruction, learning the history of Marines … Ellen stopped listening. Instead she thought about the letter to Michael in her purse, the one she had labored over night and day for the past two weeks.

It was a document that mixed all sorts of rhetorical styles; not her best work, but it had been attacked with research and revision in the manner of her best scholarly articles. First, she acknowledged his right to make his own decisions, and that she trusted his good sense and judgment. Then she wrote, not truthfully, that the goal of the letter wasn’t to make him quit, per se, but to enable him to fully understand what he was getting himself into. To consider additional perspectives. Various parts of the letter then talked about the misbegotten origins of the Iraq War, the Bush administration’s callous disregard for what the UN weapons inspectors found, i.e., nothing. She reminded him of “Mission Accomplished” idiocy and the death tolls of U.S. service members so far. She threw in Blackwater and Halliburton and Cheney. She quoted from Iraq Veterans Against the War.
I know it’s the socially acceptable custom to say “support the troops,”
Ellen had typed.
Or for soldiers to say “I’m just doing my job.” But individual Marines don’t get to stand outside what’s being perpetrated in Iraq, even if they didn’t make the decision to go there. You don’t get to wash your hands of the larger reasoning.
Switching tactics toward the end of the letter, Ellen went for the jugular. What it would do to her if he got killed. What it would do to Wes, to Jane. She laid out the basics of a carefully designed plan (put together with the help of a lawyer to whom she’d paid three hundred dollars) for getting him out of his contract. She promised job help and that they would never mention this letter again. She tried to think through every angle of his pride, which Ellen was sure would be the only obstacle. They couldn’t have gotten him yet, not with push-ups and being yelled at and marching in parades. After today, she’d found out, Mike had ten days of leave before reporting to Camp Lejeune. She’d give him the letter soon and then there would be plenty of time, in that ten days, to work out the details.

The announcer droned on. “Nobody’s said one word about Iraq,” she whispered to herself. Noting it, as if for the record.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have the honor of introducing you to the newest members of the Marines.” With that, all the khaki-green-clad men turned around, someone yelled a guttural
Oo-rah,
and then they broke ranks. Now the Marines were hugging each other. The audience didn’t seem to know what to do—they were all so far off from what was happening on the parade deck. Desultory clapping broke out, but it was unclear if the happy new Marines noticed. Ellen sat still.

The sun was in her eyes. People were climbing down from the stands, streaming toward their sons and husbands and boyfriends. Ellen stayed put.
Let him come over to me,
she thought. She was so tired, parched.

“This is bullshit,” she said aloud. A family passing by glanced at her, curious.

But then, quick-crossing the shimmering concrete, a man came toward her. Michael. Had he ever been dressed this neatly, knife-crease pants and gleaming shoes? It was easier to look at his clothes than in his face. He hugged her and didn’t let go for a long moment. Oh, Mike. There was a newness in his stance, in his body itself—always a big guy, now he had a bearing to match his size. And muscles.

“She’s crying!” Mike pulled back, pretended to gesture at onlookers. “A-ha! We get ’em all, in the end.”

“I am not,” Ellen said, dragging the sleeve of her jacket across her face.

“Funniest thing,” Mike said. “Our one toughest DI, Sergeant Gunnery Dean, he got all up in our faces 0600 this morning and was like, ‘I don’t care how emotional you feel, with your mommy and daddy watching you graduate, if I see any one of you out there in uniform crying like a girl…’” Mike chuckled. “Only that’s not exactly how he said it.”

“Well, don’t spare us on my behalf.”

Mike just grinned. “No profanity around women, ma’am.”

“Could I get some water?” Ellen asked. The two of them made their way across the sun-baked depot toward one of the low buildings on the side. There was a sign over the entrance:

THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS PROSPECTS
FOR AMERICA’S FINEST FIGHTING FORCE

People were gathered underneath, taking turns taking photos of Marines and families. Someone, a friend, shouted for Mike to join in a photo. A small group arranged themselves under the sign, facing outward. Ellen hung back, watching. Mike stood ramrod straight, his arms flat against his sides, shoulders back. His feet, heels together, were angled out in what Ellen recognized as ballet’s first position.

So like a college graduation
. UW even had a doorway like this, a mythic arch only graduates could pass through, where every spring parents took photos of their cap-and-gowned children.
Oh why couldn’t this be his college graduation
? It was unnerving how easily Mike broke away from his attention pose, after the photo was taken, and how easily he had snapped into it.

Ellen began to think as she waved to him,
Yes, I’m coming
, that her mission was going to be more difficult than expected.

*   *   *

Back at the hotel for an afternoon rest before dinner. The shades were drawn; lines of dark yellow sunlight edged the window, escaping into the room where Ellen lay in bed. Dust motes spun in the air. Muffled noises came from the carpeted hallway—trolleys and key cards. She was thinking about Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s agony when England began ramping up for war again, in the late 1930s. Hadn’t she during that time written a stinging essay against nationalism, against patriotism? Ellen almost wished Paul West were here to ask. It was conventional wisdom that Woolf’s last depression, the one that brought her to put stones in her pockets and walk into the Ouse River was brought on in part by anger and despair as a helpless pacifist. But what Ellen wanted to know was Woolf’s inner state, her personal experience. She couldn’t remember who, if any, of the men in Woolf’s life—not Leonard, she thought—were in the Great War. If any cousins or relatives had been injured or killed. How had she known about soldiers and war? Had she come to hate the fighting only because of news and talk and that singular blend of imagination and uncompromising intelligence? Or maybe it was intense fear itself, when the bombs fell on her home in London, that had made her want to give up.

Carefully slipping from bed, she put on her blue flowered kimono. On the hotel dresser next to the coffee machine were some papers from Parris Island, among them a large manila envelope. Mike had taken her on a short tour after the ceremony; what he wanted most was to show Ellen the barracks where the recruits had all slept during training. As she expected, it was a long, plain room with dozens of metal bunk beds lined up on either side. Mike pointed out how tightly his thin green wool blanket was tucked around his bed—
not like this shlub,
he said fondly, pointing to a friend’s bed nearby, which to Ellen looked identical—how everyone hung his small brown towel on the rungs of the bed, draped down neatly like a hand towel in a guest bathroom. He showed her his locker, back to back with another locker at the foot of his bed. He opened it to show what was inside, arranged in battered wood drawers—folded cammies, notepad, toiletries—and while he was bent over Ellen saw how close the hair had been shaved on the back of his head, how finely it shaded into the skin of his temple, and behind his ear. She ran a finger across it and Mike made a face.

“Classic high and tight. Six bucks, razor number one point five.” Mike ran his hand where Ellen had touched. “Wes is gonna be relentless.”

“What’s this?” Ellen picked up a corner of the large envelope that lay on top of the other items in the locker.

“No, yeah, that’s just something they make us do, our dress-blues photo. And a platoon one. We had to fill out forms on the spot so I ordered one … kind of by mistake. Also the yearbook, but I think they mail that to you later.”

“There’s a yearbook?” Ellen slid out a cardboard folder from the envelope and opened it carefully. Mike, unsmiling, in a white hat with gold insignia, buttoned blue jacket, against a lighter blue backdrop and an unfocused American flag.

“Handsome,” she said. Mike, embarrassed, took the photo out of her hands and put it back in the envelope.

“I didn’t know it would be so big,” he muttered.

“May I keep it?” Ellen asked. “Unless you had other plans.”

Mike looked at her. “No other plans.”

In the hotel bathroom, Ellen ran hot water in the shower until the mirror fogged. She rummaged among her cosmetics, then squinted at the small complimentary bottles of shampoo, conditioner, body lotion. Then under the spray of water, a rush of realization. That photo … she knew that photo. She knew its elements, its setting, its shape and form. It was the portrait newscasters ran, in a corner of the screen, when reporting the recent death tolls. Every man in that photo: young, tanned, hard faced under the white cap.
Through these portals pass prospects for America’s finest fighting force …

Ellen began to cry. And its size … there had been a framed one of Don at his memorial service, that same eight-by-eleven print. She couldn’t remember who had set it up, maybe Don’s brother. But she knew without a doubt it was the same dimensions, propped on a table near his casket, a life-size image of his laughing face, what she’d had to stare at all service from the front pew of the church.